How I made this site

Home

About

How To

Speeches

Useful links

Miscellaneous

News

Guest Book

How I made this site

Seeing this site you might have rightly judged my poor technical background. I learned the bare minimum of html and started right away in notepad. Notepad is the best tool to write html. All other fatty tools helps you make flashy pages but you don't get the thrill of writing them yourself. The few tags I use in these pages are

<html>
<title>
<body>
<a href..>
<p>
<br>
<b>
<h1> .. <h6>
<table> ..
<th>
<tr>
<td>
<h1> .. <h6>
etc..
They are not many and is enough to publish a site like this..

The point I try to convey you is that learning html is nothing.. Don't be hesitant thinking that it is not your cup of tea. It is so cool.. Whenever you feel the need to have few extras, go to W3Schools.

That was about html. If you are convinced up till now, let us proceed to see how to digitize the speech you have in your cassette. You got to have the following things

1. A PC with a sound card
2. A software to record sound.(Usually comes with the soundcard. For Soundblaster it is wavestudio)
3. A cassette player with headphone socket
4. An audio cable
Once you have all these items, connect the audio cable's one end in the headphone output of the cassette player and the other end to the mic of the sound card. Once it is done, just to test the connections, run soundrec (It is there in Start/Programs/Accessories/Entertainment/Sound Recorder), play a casseett, and press the record button in the sound recorder program. If you see waveforms, be sure that the connections are good.

The next thing is to run your audio recording software (wavestudio for example) and press the record button. It may ask for a file name which you may type an appropriate one. You can also set here certain parameters. Choose the configuration consuming the minimum of disk space. It could be Mono/11025 Hz/8 bits or something like that.. After you position the audio tape, press the record start button and also press the play button on the cassett player. When you have recorded enough, press stop. See the size of the file you just made... It will be huge.. How on earth one can publish such a huge file??

So there comes the next step. You got to compress this wave file. The smallest speech compression algorithm I could find is the true speech dsp algorithm. It is available right in your computer. Load sounred again and open the wave file you just made. Once it is fully loaded, press File/Save as and type a proper name, click on the change.. button on the right of format. You see another screen where you have the option 'DSP Group truespeech(tm)' under the dropdown for format. Choose this one, press OK and then press save. Depending on the speed of your machine, hard drive and the size of the file you are compressing it will take a proportionate time and once the saving is complete, you just check the size of the file. Believe me, it will be only 10% of what it was before.. Truespeech takes 1k/sec and I think this is the minimum size a speech can be digitized..